When he makes a movie for the whole family, Ricky Schroder doesn’t mess around.

Our Wild Hearts, a film about a rancher and the teenage daughter he never knew he had,
comes to the Hallmark Movie Channel tonight with Schroder, his wife and each of the couple’s four
children represented.

Their daughter Cambrie is making her movie debut as Willow, who decides to track down the man
whom her mother (Angela Lindvall) met and fell for at a dude ranch 15 years earlier.

There, Willow will fall in love, too — with a wild horse named Bravo — while encountering a
couple of characters (played by her older brothers, Holden and Luke) whose family resemblance
viewers are apparently meant not to notice.

Andrea Schroder, a partner in her husband’s production company, also plays a small part. (The
couple’s youngest child, Faith, is among the extras.)

Our Wild Hearts, though, should probably be considered a “sweet 16” present for Cambrie, a
high-school sophomore who has been itching to follow in her father’s footsteps.

“It was actually Cambrie’s idea and my wife’s idea to come up with a story where the whole
family could work together,” Schroder said in January during a Hallmark Channel party in Pasadena,
Calif.

“They pitched me, and I said: ‘I like it. I’ll write the script,’ ” he said. He also
directed.

Cambrie “had opportunities earlier and I just kind of held her back,” said the actor, whose TV
career took him from
Silver Spoons and
Lonesome Dove to
NYPD Blue.

“She was a racehorse, wanting to go, from a kid — like me. Out of all the children, she’s the
most like me.”

But the 42-year-old Schroder, who started his career at age 5, would first like to see her go
somewhere he didn’t: college.

“This is just the beginning for her,” he said, “and there’s really no reason to rush it.”And,
like her character, she has been riding her whole life.

Playing someone who breaks horses for a living might not sound like much of a fatherly sacrifice
for the New York-born Schroder, who fell so deeply for the West while making
Lonesome Dove that he bought a ranch in Colorado and lived there with his family for seven
years.

Except that Schroder is allergic to horses.

“I’ve done Westerns my whole life. I just don’t rub my eyes or nose” around the horses, he said.
“I did
Lonesome Dove, and I rode horses for three months and sneezed and wheezed my way through
it.”

He’s also not quite as no-nonsense as his character, who clashes with his daughter over the
practicalities of ranch life.

“We have three mini-donkeys right now that we’re having a kick with” (and that don’t give him
hives), Schroder said.

And the point of mini- donkeys?

“They are very friendly, very smart, very social,” he said. “Bottle-raised, so they want to
always get in your lap, practically. They’re just tender creatures. They’re cute. They’re pure
pets. Just put them in the pasture and let them mow the grass.”